The Course of Honour Read online

  For the first time since he fed the finch he got to his feet and came to her, holding out his hands. Caenis was trembling. He always knew how to reduce her to rubble, then say exactly the right thing. ‘Oh I have missed you!’ declared Vespasian in a low voice; she was lost.

  With her hands twined in his but still seated, Caenis spoke, once, what sooner or later she would have to say. Better now, than in some unrelated quarrel afterwards. ‘I have lived the best years of my life, and lived them without you.’

  He did not flinch. ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I built my own life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He drew her to her feet. Coming to him, Caenis said, ‘I missed you too. I missed you more than you or anybody else will ever understand. I have to tell you this. For the sake of what I have been, what I endured, what I have done. This has to be acknowledged between us now.’

  Gravely he let her speak; probably he did not fear anything she might say because he knew she would always be just. He did not even agitate for her answer. Perhaps he knew what it would be. Then because even now Caenis could not bear to let him see her cry, she stayed silent for longer than she wanted. She had to struggle to control herself but in the end she managed in her calm, trained, competent voice: ‘If it is what you want, yes I will come.’

  His reaction was the last thing she expected: she saw suddenly, there were tears in his eyes.

  ‘Titus? Oh love!’

  He was smiling the small pale smile that she had seen once before when he left her, though only now with blinding recognition did she finally understand it. She saw him swallow as he recovered himself. ‘Sentimental old beggar. Excuse me; I really didn’t think you would.’

  Faced with an emergency, Caenis was at once herself: ‘Frankly, if I had thought that you felt sure of me, I don’t suppose I would agree.’

  Then as he laughed once more in that delighted way, she remembered. It was Crete all over again. In public life the next step after consul was a provincial governorship.

  ‘You are due for a province. Agrippina can’t debar you for ever. You will be going abroad!’ Life never changed.

  Last time she had been fending him off; then they were so young they had years heaped like treasures in spoilheaps ahead of them. This time she was in his arms; he knew exactly how she felt. This time she could let herself feel his devotion to her – and to let him go now would be unbearable.

  Titus Flavius Vespasianus muttered a country curse. ‘I seem to have explained myself badly; or perhaps my assumptions were impertinent. When I asked you to live with me what I meant was that barring riot or rebellion, where I go I hope you will come too.’

  Caenis could hardly believe it. ‘One day you will be governor of Africa; and I –’

  ‘You will be the governor’s lady,’ he said. ‘Of course!’

  XXXIII

  Sometimes the most major events take place so quietly. Caenis was to live with Vespasian: it was as simple as that.

  There were one or two riffles. There was a brief moment of tension the first time she went to Reate. She had been introduced to the servants, who seemed if anything more docile and pleased to see her than the high-handed experts with whom Aglaus had peopled her own home. In the house she had spotted the marks of long-term financial tension: not quite enough furniture, hangings pushed to last half a decade beyond their natural life, even items that were new all faintly drab as if years of having no money made it feel sinful to invest in anything that was genuinely attractive. Caenis did not mind. She was a woman who enjoyed tackling problems.

  She had been sitting quietly with Vespasian. He was smiling at her. He tended to smile a great deal in private now; they were both as light-headed as rapturous young things. Then the door crashed open. (Caenis wondered how often the door hinges in Flavian homes had to be renewed.) The two boys, Titus and Domitian, burst into the room.

  ‘Aha!’ From what Vespasian had already told her Caenis knew enough to realise that the mere fact they were obviously conspiring boded badly.

  Their heroic papa had started to look unusually diffident. ‘Aha!’ he retorted, with boisterous fatherly cheer. Then Titus strode across the floor in the full dignity of outraged seventeen, while Domitian ran alongside, a pugnacious six-year-old who was silently egging his elder brother on. It was Titus who had exclaimed. Domitian was running too fast to speak. ‘Our noble papa – and a lady friend!’

  It was plain that they knew her intended position. Vespasian must have made some formal announcement. They had discussed it hotly amongst themselves. They were bent on demanding that this situation be renegotiated on lines that better suited them. Boys do like to be respectable.

  They had not until that moment known who their father’s mistress was.

  Caenis gracefully turned; her eyebrows arched in apparent mild surprise. Titus stopped. He clapped his hand to his head in frank and blissful amazement. He looked well. Better still, shining with delight. ‘Oh, but you said you did not know him any more!’

  ‘We renewed our acquaintance,’ Caenis smiled. Titus was no longer any threat. He adored her. He always would.

  ‘Come here!’ said Vespasian cheerfully to the little one, pulling him into the security of that great arm. ‘Now watch Titus realise that his old father has snaffled his special turtledove from under his nose.’

  Since Titus was by now saying nothing Domitian, who was too young to be sensitive to immediate change, piped up aggressively, ‘Is this to be my stepmother?’ in tones of disgust.

  Before Vespasian could speak, Caenis answered the child calmly, ‘If you are thinking that you would not like it, Domitian, let me tell you at once, I should not like it either. No; I am not,’ she assured him. ‘So you don’t have to hate me, and I shall not feel obliged to be wicked to you.’

  The boy stared. They would never be friends, but he knew that temporarily at least Caenis had beaten him.

  Vespasian, who evidently fell into the rough-and-tumble category of fathers, engaged Domitian in a minor bout of punch-bag scuffling. Whether this reassured anybody Caenis could not tell. Certainly Domitian himself wriggled under his father’s arm as soon as he could escape, in order to demand of Titus, ‘What shall we do?’

  Pulling the stiff enraged figure from his father, Titus stooped down to fix his brother’s eye. ‘We are going to welcome this lady to our house.’

  ‘You said –’

  ‘It was a mistake.’

  ‘Does that mean,’ persisted Domitian, genuinely puzzled, ‘we have to be polite?’

  Titus gripped his brother by one tight fist. He walked the curly-headed tot, who looked much more appealing than he ever was, to where Caenis sat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Titus, before he gravely kissed her cheek and made Domitian do the same. ‘It’s a democratic vote: two to one against you in the other voting-urn – Father and me.’

  ‘You agree with Papa? Why?’

  ‘Little brother, she once saved my life.’

  ‘Sweet, aren’t they?’ grinned their proud father.

  Caenis pursed her mouth. ‘Wonderful! And both so like their papa.’

  There was comment on their relationship, at least initially. Veronica said, switching her opinion as sweetly illogical as ever, ‘I saw it coming years ago. Now watch yourself, girl; at your time of life this could be an expensive mistake.’

  ‘You have to admire him,’ Caenis told her levelly.

  ‘What – for taking his old mistress back? It stinks! I admire you, for accepting him.’

  ‘It shows that I think he’s worth it.’

  ‘It shows he’s a complete worm and you’re a sucker. With no need to put himself out again, he gets himself a treasure – a good manager, clever and amusing, an armful any man would envy –’

  ‘A canteen of cutlery, a good set of Greek bowls, cheap shorthand, and no risk any longer of having ragamuffin children.’ Caenis spoke with a deliberate lightness which would prove to Veronica that she knew all the implications. Then, m
ore benevolent than Veronica had ever seen her in thirty years, she handed her friend a small object which she took from a clip on her belt.

  ‘Whatever’s that?’

  It was an old iron key. From a nation whose iron-masters and brass-founders were of the highest calibre, this was a pitiful specimen. It was two inches long, with a bent stem and missing one of its rusty teeth; it hung from a short piece of twisted leather thong that was greasy and blackened with age; an unsavoury toggle, possibly amber but probably some grimmer fossil, was knotted at the farther end.

  Caenis explained: ‘What you have in your hand is a symbolic gesture of the sentimental Sabine kind. I shall never be married with the witnesses and auguries, he won’t take me in torchlight procession to his house, his servants will not greet me with fire and salt when I arrive. But there used to be a tradition – most people don’t bother any more – that a Roman ceremonially handed the keys of his house to his bride as a sign that she was now in charge of his domestic affairs.’

  ‘So?’ demanded Veronica curiously, eyeing askance the grizzly little relic that still lay on her palm.

  ‘That is the key to Vespasian’s store-cupboard,’ Caenis reported. Veronica hastily handed it back.

  Their living together hardly merited public notice. Vespasian had been right. Because he had done all society required, society took a lenient view when he did that which – in theory – ought to be condemned. Besides, almost from the first day their partnership appeared to everyone as they saw it themselves: the inevitable way for Caenis and Vespasian to live. There was no fuss. There were few confrontations. Vespasian now held such a substantial reputation that an act of open eccentricity actually enhanced his position. Rome, which had bound itself in edicts and regulations, admired a man with the self-confidence to stand out for principles of his own in his personal affairs.

  Vespasian was still living quietly in country retirement, which helped. He kept his house in Rome, since a consular senator had to appear from time to time, unless he wanted to be reprimanded by the Emperor – or worse. But he spent as much time as possible at Reate, and that suited everyone. His provincial appointment was continually deferred. Nobody told him that the delay was due to the enmity of Agrippina, but he drew the obvious conclusion. He had become more of an outsider than ever, not that he seemed to mind too much. He was still ambitious enough to want the post, but dreaded the expense of it.

  The Emperor’s mother had enjoyed a brief spell of unprecedented influence, but caused such outrage by her assumption of almost equal powers with Nero and her improper public appearances as his consort that a year after his accession Nero was able to insist that she withdrew from the main Palace complex and took up residence in the House of Livia. This freed Nero to indulge in artistic pursuits, sexual licence with male and female conquests, all-day banquets, gladiatorial shows, and a fairly humane political policy encouraged by his mentors, the philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian commander Burrus.

  His alleged incest with Agrippina was long past. Eventually his irritation at her cloying mother-love and her dominating ambition reached the point where in the grand Claudian tradition he determined to be rid of her. Exile to a small island seemed insufficient; she had been exiled before, and proved she could survive and return worse than ever. At first he tormented her with lawsuits and encouraged her to take unwanted holidays. It took him four years of such scheming to work up the courage for a serious attack. Then while Agrippina was staying at Antonia’s huge seaside villa at Bauli he managed to dispose of her – though not without a farcical series of failed attempts. He failed to poison her (she kept taking antidotes), or drown her (when her galley fell to pieces in the Bay of Naples she swam to safety), or to crush her under a collapsible ceiling (someone had warned her it was there). He stopped being subtle. He simply had her put to the sword: one more of Antonia’s grandchildren violently destroyed. But the accusation of matricide was one Nero would find harder to shake off than he first realised.

  Freed from Agrippina’s jealousy, Vespasian began to spend more time in Rome again, and eventually – though not immediately – he was awarded his province. As Narcissus had long ago promised, he was to be governor of Africa.

  ‘Of course you’re heart-broken, Caenis,’ Veronica consoled her. ‘Still, you should get a nice rest from him while he trips off to the hot spots. Will he let you stay in his house while he’s away?’ She had phrased it tactfully, since she was well aware that the house Caenis owned herself was far more elegant and comfortable.

  ‘I’m going to Africa with him.’

  Even Veronica, who had seen a great deal of human nature and of life, was nonplussed. ‘Well! Make sure you keep your lease on your own house – and insist that miser pays your fare.’

  ‘No need. As part of the governor’s household, the travel pass for transporting me to Africa will be provided, with the customary bad grace, by the State Treasury. I count as one of the governor’s travelling chests.’

  ‘You really know how to make a fool of yourself for a man,’ Veronica told her frankly.

  By the time Caenis and Vespasian reached Africa their lives had grown into one another inextricably. Their domestic partnership was by then some years old and their relationship had assumed a solid permanence. They lived together, at the same pace, in the same style, sharing the same debates and humour, locked close in body and thought. They became a single unit, satisfied with one another and with life.

  Of Vespasian’s governorship in Africa three things were remembered afterwards: first, despite the opportunities for profit, Vespasian came home no richer than he went; in fact his credit was used up and he had been keeping his bank account buoyant by commercial flirtations, mostly involving wet fish. Second, it was grudgingly agreed that his term of office ran with dignity and justice. Third, the only sour incident recorded was when the people of Hadrumetum rioted and pelted him with turnips.

  What went unrecorded – perhaps because though just it was not dignified – was how the Governor of Africa cursed the lively temperament of the people of Hadrumetum but managed to capture two of their turnips. He took them home to present to Caenis with his good-humoured grin. Caenis, straight-faced, had them made into soup, which the Governor ate with great gusto, particularly since he had not had to pay for it.

  XXXIV

  Nothing lasts.

  They had enjoyed fourteen years under Claudius; then there were fourteen years of Nero to be endured. For most of that reign Caenis lived with Vespasian. Although in political terms the time seemed endless to those who did not court the Emperor’s favour, for her it flew by.

  They had achieved almost a decade of quiet domesticity, which was a long time. It was longer than most marriages survived before death or divorce intervened; it was much longer than many people even hoped to stick things out. Cautious as she was, she had begun to believe she could hope to end her days living like this.

  Then, when Flavius Vespasianus was fifty-seven – late for any man to embark on a new phase in his life – he made the mistake of accompanying Nero on his fabled tour of Greece. It was a musical tour. Nero by then had ceased to heed his friends’ warnings that stage and arena appearances, whether as a charioteer or a singer, would offend public opinion to a damaging degree. He now saw himself as an artiste; nobody dared to scoff at him openly, while the flatterers who surrounded him encouraged his flight from reality.

  Vespasian was cultured. He always knew exactly what entertainment was available in Rome, because he liked Caenis to go. In his own house he had been observed to pause in the atrium for ten minutes at a time if he could hear someone singing, though that was because the person who sang in Vespasian’s house was Caenis. He was not smitten with the sound of the lyre; in particular he hated it played badly. So going on an extended foreign tour with Nero was a mistake.

  Titus came with them to Greece. By then Titus was twenty-six and he hated the tour with the frustration of a man who had a good ear, and who could himself play
well, although unlike the Emperor he would not dream of performing upon a public stage.

  Before they went to Africa, Titus had joined the army as a tribune in Germany. Vespasian long cherished a hope that his son would do his military service in Britain, best of all in the Second Augusta, his own legion, or at least the Ninth Hispana which was commanded by Petilius Cerialis who had been married to his daughter, Flavia. In the event they were all relieved Titus started in Germany instead. In Eastern Britain there had been a series of administrative atrocities, which Vespasian described in a short phrase that Caenis chose to interpret as a military term (he probably did learn it in the army but she guessed it was not a regular expression of command in line of march). Eventually the Queen of the Iceni, outraged by the dispossession of her chief tribesmen from their estates, her own disinheritance as her husband’s heir, and the rape of her two teenaged daughters by a Roman finance officer’s thugs, swept through the province in a ferocious rebellion. The scale and savagery were appalling. For a time it appeared Britain was completely lost. Three major towns were burnt to the ground, thousands of settlers lost their lives, and the Ninth Hispana were ambushed so disastrously that Cerialis and a few rags of cavalry only just escaped alive.

  Titus subsequently did lead the German detachments sent to support the decimated British legions during the period of recovery. He became popular in Britain. He and his father exchanged an interesting series of letters on the subject of Empire and provincial government.

  By the time they all went to Greece Titus had done a further stint as a quaestor and formally entered the Senate. He had been married twice, widowed once and once divorced; he had a baby daughter, Julia. He had been practising as a barrister, though more to make himself a name in Rome than because he was particularly eloquent. His brother, Domitian, was approaching sixteen; during their Greek trip he was left behind at school.